The day my freewheelin’ hero Bob Dylan became a legend

Inspired by the home cinema release of Logan, Telegraph Men editor Jonny Cooper recalls the day Bob Dylan became a legend for him.

The brutal and emotional Marvel thriller Logan – available on digital download now and on Blu-ray™ and DVD on Monday 10 July – sees a single-minded and tireless hero conquer old age to inspire a new generation. It’s about a hero becoming a legend. For Telegraph Men editor Jonny Cooper, it sparked memories of his own ageing hero, who became a legend on one very special day.

I grew up expecting too much from Bob Dylan.

It started when I was a teenager, in a car, in America. I’d love to be able to say I was hitching my way from coast to coast, a young tearaway with a guitar on his back and barely a dime in his pocket – but no, I was on holiday with my family, squashed between a young brother and even younger sister, who both had vomit on the mind (and possibly seat belt).

I remember plugging Blood On The Tracks into my Discman – my first Dylan CD, bought moments earlier during an unscheduled sick-stop at an out-of-town Borders. Friends at school had eulogised his name and I knew I was about to leap into new territory.

In retrospect, I wasn’t ready to jump. First a guitar jangled up, then a man’s strained voice came through, and then … he kept going. Line after monotonous line dribbled out, punctuated only by the occasional word sung as though Dylan was passing by on a freight train. “Lord knows I’ve paid some dues gettin’ throuuuuuuugh / Tangled up in bluuuuuuue.”

Christ, this sounded awful.

Like coffee, beer, and cigarettes, you have to teach yourself to like Bob Dylan. I persevered. Slowly, over the course of more car journeys, I began to see the art in Dylan’s words. Blood On The Tracks is his great break-up album of broken love stories and excoriating cynicism. It’s folk emo, and teenage me grew to love it.

I returned home that summer and went the full Dylan, ploughing through his back catalogue: the early protest albums; the cartwheeling, electric mid-1960s; the determinedly anti-contemporary late 1960s (John Wesley Harding a personal favourite); the fabulist 1970s; the largely loathsome 1980s; and finally onto the latter-day blues crooner stuff. By the end of the summer, it was official: Dylan was my hero, and I would henceforth worship at his freewheeling alter.

Dylan was about more than just the music. I started obsessing over documentary footage of him, and re-reading the now-legendary interviews where he schools journalists in the art of interviewing. I even dyed my hair black, in the vain hope that I’d look more like Bob.

But it’s hard to get close to Dylan the man. He refuses to interpret his songs and hides his private life behind a wall of gnomic deterrence. However much you worship him, he’s never quite yours.

This always bugged me, until I saw him play at the Brixton Academy, in 2005. At the time, Dylan was a stadium artist, so I’m not sure what he was doing at the Academy – a small, intimate place in comparison.

It was the performance of a brilliant, eccentric legend – a man who knows his music will always speak louder than his words

It felt like we were in Dylan’s front room that night – that at any moment during the set, he might look up from under his big hat and ask us what to play next, or even whether we’d like to join him for a drink at the bar. He didn’t. Instead, he ignored us completely, rattled through his set, waved his harmonica in our direction, and buggered off.

On the way out, I overheard someone call his behaviour disdainful. I begged to differ. It was the performance of a brilliant, eccentric legend – a man who knows his music will always speak louder than his words. We’d simply been foolish to expect anything else.

When heroes become legends

In this series of articles, brought to you by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, The Telegraph’s best columnists are inspired by the movie Logan to remember when their heroes became legends. Read all the articles at telegraph.co.uk/logan.

In Logan, director James Mangold brings a visceral and gritty realism to the story, based on one of Marvel Comics’ most popular characters. Starring Hugh Jackman for the last time, Logan is a dark vision of the near future where hope comes at the end of a blade.

Logan is available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD and digital download now. 4K and Blu-ray discs come with the even more striking and dramatic black-and-white version, Logan Noir. Buy Logan now.